The present invention relates generally to data recording devices, and more particularly, to a device to collect usage data for a motor vehicle and to interface with a microcomputer.
Persons using a company vehicle for personal, business, or other travel-related purposes are faced with the challenge of maintaining accurate, timely mileage and usage records for tax deduction reporting and for internal record keeping. Persons responsible for keeping records for fleets of business vehicles must keep track of vehicle usage by company employees, and must maintain organized, detailed records of individual vehicle data and statistics for entire vehicle fleets.
Keeping truly contemporaneous records by hand is a tedious task. The operator of the vehicle must keep a pen and journal or clipboard-type log on hand in the vehicle at all times, and then must remember to make the necessary entry for each trip's mileage, date, time, and purpose. Furthermore, at reporting time, all entries for a given period must be tabulated by hand to produce a final cumulative record for that period.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,685,061 to Whitaker discloses one version of an automatic data recording device. It allows entry of a alphanumeric code to identify the purpose of a trip and keeps track of the time and distance travelled for each trip. Whitaker, however, uses vehicle motion as a sole criterion for when to begin and end recording data for a trip. This criterion can be disadvantageous if a motor vehicle must make several stops during the course of a single trip. For example, a delivery vehicle may leave a central distribution point and proceed to various customer locations where the driver leaves the vehicle running while he makes deliveries. In addition to stops made during deliveries the driver will make stops due to stop lights and traffic jams. In such a case each new start of motion is recorded as the beginning of a new trip and an operator must reenter the code specifying the trip purpose. Such repeated reentry of codes is inefficient and annoying and results in trip information being saved that does not accurately reflect vehicle usage, since one long trip containing several stops will actually be recorded as several short trips.
Whitaker attempts to solve the above problem by specifying a time duration that must elapse before interruptions in vehicle motion are interpreted as the end of a trip. Use of such a specified time duration is a stop-gap measure at best, however, because no matter what time duration is specified, stops will always occur that are longer than the specified duration, again causing the inefficient and inaccurate data recording described above.
The present invention overcomes the problems and disadvantages of the prior art by using the activating and deactivating of a vehicle engine as the primary criteria for determining the beginning and end of a trip and by including a computer-compatible means to download data to an external device, such as a microcomputer.
An object of the invention is to provide a device to collect vehicle usage data for a vehicle trip beginning when the vehicle ignition is activated and ending when the vehicle ignition is deactivated.
Another object of the invention is to provide a device to collect vehicle maintenance data for a vehicle.
Another object of the invention is to provide a device to collect other travel-related data such as data on meals and lodging expenses.
A further object of the invention is to provide a device to collect vehicle usage data that can be connected directly to an external device and that can download the collected data to the external device.
Additional objects and advantages of the invention will be set forth in part in the description which follows, and in part will be obvious from the description, or maybe learned by practice of the invention. The objects and advantages of the invention will be realized and obtained by means of the elements and combinations particularly pointed out in the appended claims.